For the past five years, I’ve been tracking every movie I watch, every television show I watch, and every book I read. I set a few parameters for myself when I started — I only track movies I watch from start to finish, entire seasons of television shows, and books I finish. I don’t track sporting events like basketball and football games or individual episodes of television shows I catch while couch surfing.

I’ve been keeping the list on a standard webpage and I’ve been doing the HTML code by hand. Not only has the page become a long unmanageable mess, but it doesn’t lean itself to easy data analysis. I can’t easily count or sort movies with a static list.

Early this morning, I spent several hours importing the list into a Google Sheets. Each line of the spreadsheet tracks the year, the order, the category, the title, the year the movie/show/book was created, whether or not I’ve seen it before, and a very short one line comment. Not all of the fields are populated; I’m working on it.

Google Sheets includes code that allows you to insert a sheet into a standard website. I’ve replaced the old list with the sheet. Every time I update the sheet, the page updates in real time. Ain’t technology somethin’. Also, now that the data’s in a spreadsheet, I can sort it any number of ways. I can easily find the oldest movie I watched this year.

I did all of this while meeting my other goal, which was to go 24 hours without wearing pants on my vacation. Check, and check.

At the end of each year I write a summary of that year’s consumption. I’ll be doing that sometime after Christmas but before New Year’s. This spreadsheet will make it easier to do.

Link: Media List 2020